Easter, despite the fuzzy bunnies and colorful eggs, is a season of religious faith or lack thereof for Christians, and this season’s spring equinox has just passed, and for our Pagan friends we have Beltane coming up and Passover for our Jewish friends…. I’m sure there are other faiths and religions I am missing here for the spring season.

Spring is known as a time of reflection, freshening, cleaning and rebirth or resurrection.

Unsent Letters would like to feature the most outstanding religious themed letters the week of April 10th – April 17th.

These letters, if accepted, will receive a flat $10 payment and will be posted on the blog with TWO live links to sites of your choice and will be heavily promoted. Some of these letters can still be considered for publication in future Unsent Letters books as well, and might receive book publication offers, but the primary focus will be for the blog.

From now until April 7th, we are seeking religious Unsent Letters. The letter can be to God, a deity of choice, Jesus, a religious leader, a church, an entire denomination or faith, a pastor, minister, Sunday school teacher, the Bible, to your parents about the faith they raised you in, etc.

Be creative, but there must be a ‘religious’ or ’spiritual’ intent behind the letter. No, the letters don’t have to be ‘positive’ or ‘uplifting’, but if you go ‘negative’, please no ‘hate-speech’. Not all letters will be accepted, so give us your best.

In order to ensure these letters are reviewed in a timely manner, send them the same way you would any Unsent Letter, but change the subject line to:

UNSENT LETTERS SUBMISSIONS – EASTER

For the rest of the guidelines, see this link:

http://ourunsentletters.com/node/3

Hope you’ll submit! Please spread the word!

Love and stuff,
Michy
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Offers are coming a lot faster now than before. YAY! It really does motivate me to keep writing.

My goal was to write the same number of articles for AC for upfront as I did for Helium. I have a few more to go to be sure. Because of the delay in publishing, I have about one more week left of the challenge before I can post the results of the challenge and then compare to Helium.

Then, I just finished emailing with Suite101 about the challenge with them in May. The final results of all three coming the second week of June, thereabouts.

Anyhoo, let’s look at some of what happened on AC today:

Lowest offers was $4.36, which they said was ‘too common’, and then the highest this round was $5.03.

What’s really surprising me is how low the performance bonus is.

It’s not totally fair to compare Helium’s running total to AC’s performance bonus, because Helium does revenue sharing, not page view payments. Some of Helium’s channels pay more than others. I really believed going into this that AC would blow Helium away on the passive part of the income. Part of what is hurting the performance bonus on AC is that the articles aren’t indexing timely.

My friend helped me out again, but checking my published content on the challenge account today, I’ve still got three that aren’t indexed. But that’s better than what it was the other day. Still, that means several of my articles on the challenge account haven’t even been discoverable until just the last few days. That hurts page views for the challenge, I’m afraid.

Still, hour for hour worked versus pay, AC’s upfront payments are still wining out over Helium. However, AC might want to be careful. As Helium continues to improve the payments made to writers upfront, with the higher beginner’s revenue share over AC’s performance bonus, Helium just might end up being a major contender in the big content sites sooner than folks think.

I checked my stats today on Suite101… I’m very excited now to see how things work over there. The three sites have the same final purpose, but how they pay writers varies. AC upfront and performance bonus – Helium is upfront (monthly) and revenue share – and Suite101 which is a straight revenue share by percentages (make more the longer you’re there and the more you write).

I’m still thinking I’ll see the biggest overall from Suite101, with AC being the second and Helium third (but the Marketplace still being good for additional revenue.)

What do you guys think?

Guess we’ll find out more in June on that.

For now, time to get back to work so the challenge is fair and I get the same number of articles up on all three sites!

Love and stuff,
Michy
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I’m truly impressed with the recent turn around times, and just like I predicted, the faster AC is approving me the more likely I am to write more. It’s very motivating to see offers coming in so quickly. I put two articles up last night and both were reviewed today. That’s atypical. I’d like for that to be the norm!

Maybe they are working on making it the norm? It’s good for us and good for them, because I feel certain that other people feel the same way about it, that they write more when offers are faster in coming.

That said, I got a couple offers yesterday and a few today. Lowest was $4.27 and the highest was $5.11.

My page view average is up to 71 now, so even with new articles being published, I’m slowing climbing. That’s a plus.

That’s really all for today though – I’m off to get some of my own personal fiction writing done now. I’ve got a fiction deadline on my novel! I’ll update more after the weekend!

Love and stuff,
Michy
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Well, got my lowest offer on my challenge account today… $3.98. It does get discouraging when offers start getting that low. If an article takes me 20-30 minutes to write, I’m not even breaking 8 bucks per hour at that rate. I’m used to making more than that. I don’t think I’ve worked for 8 bucks per hour since I was in college. We won’t mention how long ago.

Still, 8 bucks per hour is not bad for someone just starting out, and it is a long-term goal thing. The idea is that the offers will grow and the page views will grow, and the performance bonus will eventually fill in the gaps. My real account is proof positive of that.

However, I should have prefaced my whining with the fact that I knew the article I got that offer on was saturated on the internet and on AC.

Unfortunately, after the weekend, going in and checking articles today, I’ve discovered that there are three new ones that haven’t indexed. They really aren’t hard to tell, because they have very low page views compared to the others. Right now, my average is sitting at about 70 page views per article. I’m thinking that’s not so bad, since my oldest article is only three weeks old and my newest is two days old, and considering that five of them still aren’t indexed yet.

Because I’m working under the radar, I can’t promote those missing indexed articles, so I really have no way to get them indexed. Shrug. I’ll fix them once I reveal who I am on the challenge account and then I’ll get them indexed and let those sit until I check back for the stats on them in June when I write up the comparison of the big three sites: Helium, Suite101, and of course, Associated Content.

So far, AC is still smoking Helium on dollar per hour worked. Interestingly enough, Helium is smoking AC on the page view revenue, but AC’s upfront payments are more than making up for it.

Will AC’s upfront payments make up for the page view revenue on Suite101? I’m actually curious about that now. I’m enjoying the challenge in one respect. In another respect, it’s becoming a little discouraging when I think how much money I could have made if I’d done this on my own account. The challenge will be ending soon, and I will have to let this account go… hey, that’s gonna hurt!

It’ll be worth it though. I’ve enjoyed the comparison.

So far, AC’s biggest detriments are the long wait times for offers and the site glitches. They REALLY need to fix the site glitches. In the entire challenge for Helium, I ran into only one glitch and that was not really a glitch. It was a scheduled site maintenance early one morning for about two hours. It was when most people in the US probably were asleep.

AC needs to fix the glitches, for sure. It does seem, however, that the articles I put up in the last batch got reviewed faster than they had been. Only a three day wait for this last batch.

Anyway, just wanted to blow off steam about things not indexing again. I know my average would be over 100 if they were indexing. I guess for a three week old account as far as posting articles, I’ll live with the 70 average.

That’s it for tonight. More to come soon!

Love and stuff,
Michy
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I was surprised today that all of the pending articles I had submitted on the challenge account were given offers! Wow! The offers appear to have gone down a little bit. I won’t list them all individually, but they average $4.53 for all of them.

The highest one was offered $5.16 and the lowest was the lowest yet at $4.11. It received the stock comment that it wasn’t unique enough and was too similar to other things on AC. None of the others received a comment from the CM.

In an ironic twist, the article that has received the highest offer was the same one that was rejected prior for not citing sources. I think I told you guys I had changed it a little to state it was personal experience? That article is now my highest offer.

It just goes to show, AC really does want that ‘personal experience’ along with solid information.

So I did a little figuring with the new offers now, and I’m up to over $7.00 per hour for the hourly wage now. I’m very pleased with that. It will continue to go up from there, I’m hoping.

While it’s not going to make me rich any time soon, over $7.00 per hour is more than the national minimum wage and I’d rather make 7 bucks per hour writing at home with my feet put up than making less than that while flipping burgers.

Wouldn’t you?

Also, that’s nearly $5 per hour higher than where I was with the Helium challenge at this point.

A few other CPs have found the account, not sure whether they know it’s me or not, but they are leaving nice comments and have welcomed me to AC. I don’t feel like I’m writing in a vacuum so much anymore. If this were my ‘real’ new account, I would probably be feeling pretty stoked about people starting to find me and leave me good comments.

All said and done, I’m pleased. Only one complaint today… AC made offers on all my submitted articles! Now I guess I have to write a bunch more!

I think that’s important for AC to consider though… now that my queue is empty, I’m all ready to write more! If they would make their offers faster and keep up with them without a wait time, or a long wait time, I think more people would submit more often. Having an empty queue is a good incentive to write more!

So I guess that’s what I’ll go do!

Love and stuff,
Michy
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If you are having problems with articles indexing or staying indexed on AC, they are tracking the issue so they can determine what the problem is. Laura contacted me about this when I gave her a detailed description of what was happening.

They still don’t know what is happening or why, but at least they now are acknowledging that it is happening. They were saying it was a Google issue, but I did let Laura know that it was happening on Live Search and Yahoo! Search too, so it can’t be just Google.

Here’s what she said to me:

“We’d like to keep a log of specific incidents where people notice indexing discrepancies, so that we can analyze all of the details and look for patterns in what is indexing and how long it takes. Yours that you sent already are noted and I know that you said you’ve discussed this in the Forum before, if you notice other people making the same complaint will you let them know that the best move is to send a detailed report to Admin (including the publish date, if the article indexed or not, when it disappeared if it did) so that we can be sure to know exactly what is happening and when?”

So when you find an article not indexing within about 1-2 days of publication, go ahead and send them an email. Do it clearly with exact details. Start the subject with something like: Google Indexing Problem Information

And then in the email, give them all the following:

Your Profile Page link

Link to the article that hasn’t indexed (use the .html ending link)

Date the article was published.

If the article indexed and then disappeared, include the date when you noticed it was indexed and when you noticed it disappeared. If you notice it comes back, let them know when/if it does, and look at the blog I posted here and see if it indexed the right was (with description) or the wrong way (with code).

This way, the tech guys can see if they can catch a pattern or what it is that’s happening and determine what the cause might be.

Hope this helps everyone.

See today’s update on the Associated Content Month-Long Challenge!

Love and stuff,
Michy

I have a message for you guys about the indexing issues. AC_Laura emailed me yesterday and they are acknowledging there is something up, but they are saying at this point it appears to be a Google issue. I know it’s not likely that’s the case, but I’ll get to that after my update. Stayed tuned till the end, ’cause I have information from AC on what to do if you’re having indexing woes.

First, let’s talk about the offers I got yesterday. I won’t say how many I got, because they’ll likely all publish at once, and though a few of you have likely found my challenge account by now, most of you reading have not. It doesn’t skew the numbers for a few of you to have found me, but it does if I post the link to the account, so I’ll still keep that off the blog for now.

Let’s look at an overview of yesterday’s articles.

The maximum offer yesterday was $5.05. The lowest offer, with the stock excuse that it was a lower than usual offer because the content was too common on the internet, received $4.48. That’s my lowest offer yet. Out of the ones approved yesterday, I agree with AC… that particular article was the most ‘common’.

You’ll probably remember I said that there was one article they rejected for it not having sources? Well, I resubmitted it two days ago, still nothing on it, but the one that was offered at the same time as that one did finally publish yesterday. Guess we’ll wait a little while longer on that one.

Right now, I’m sitting at $3.08 per hour. However, I have 9 articles sitting in wait, and a few that published yesterday with no page views. Assuming those not yet offered on get 4.50 (which is fair consider all my offers but one have been over that), then that puts me at $5.30 per hour.

It’s not minimum wage yet… but I’m betting it’s going to be a lot higher once I’m finished.

At any rate, it is nearly 3 bucks per hour spent higher than Helium was at this point. Interestingly enough, Helium by this time was paying me a lot more in page views than AC is, but the difference of nearly 2 bucks per article in upfronts more than makes up for that.

Lots more to put up today – I’m shooting for submitting 15 new articles today. Yeah, crazy, I know. I have three finished that I need to proof, and then I’ll put up 12 more. I think I can do it!

Now, on to the indexing issue.

Laura contacted me about this. They still don’t know what is happening or why, but at least they now are acknowledging that it is happening. They were saying it was a Google issue, but I did let Laura know that it was happening on Live Search and Yahoo! Search too, so it can’t be just Google.

Here’s what she said to me:

“We’d like to keep a log of specific incidents where people notice indexing discrepancies, so that we can analyze all of the details and look for patterns in what is indexing and how long it takes. Yours that you sent already are noted and I know that you said you’ve discussed this in the Forum before, if you notice other people making the same complaint will you let them know that the best move is to send a detailed report to Admin (including the publish date, if the article indexed or not, when it disappeared if it did) so that we can be sure to know exactly what is happening and when?”

So when you find an article not indexing within about 1-2 days of publication, go ahead and send them an email. Do it clearly with exact details. Start the subject with something like: Google Indexing Problem Information

And then in the email, give them all the following:

Your Profile Page link

Link to the article that hasn’t indexed (use the .html ending link)

Date the article was published.

If the article indexed and then disappeared, include the date when you noticed it was indexed and when you noticed it disappeared. If you notice it comes back, let them know when/if it does, and look at the blog I posted here and see if it indexed the right was (with description) or the wrong way (with code).

This way, the tech guys can see if they can catch a pattern or what it is that’s happening and determine what the cause might be.

Hope this helps everyone.

Any questions?

Love and stuff,
Michy

PS: Some folks have asked how long the challenge is going to go on, and because of the delay in the first articles publishing, to be fair to the challenge, it will end on April 7th.
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Ugh, I’m a little confused by a couple of things. First, let me start with the numbers part, because the indexing part gets a little complicated.

One of the articles I had yesterday was showing 7 page views. However, it was a two page article. Three people had commented on it, I read the article myself when it first published, and a friend of mine read it too (different IP, different city). That means the minimum page views I should have had were 10. If the three who commented read both pages and commented, then the minimum should be 13.

But it was only 7. Curious. I’m not saying AC cheated me… what I’m thinking is that I don’t know the cut off point for when they do the updates and I think it’s sometime in the middle of the day.

Okay, next, I started this post yesterday, but never finished it.

The one article that hadn’t indexed finally did (thanks to my friend), but it’s odd. It indexed differently than my other articles. Let me see if I can explain it by using examples from my real account.

Okay, yesterday, I started writing this post and fell asleep instead. Oops, but before I did, I checked for my Objectum Sexual article being indexed in Google. It was. Today, I checked it to finish writing this blog post, and here’s what I get:

Your search – http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1560943/objectum_sexuality_a_glimpse_into_the.html – did not match any documents.

(sigh)

This is exactly what I’ve been trying to tell Associated Content was happening. The article indexed beautifully, with a description of the article matching the abstract. It was perfect. Today, it can’t be found.

What will happen is, within the next three to five days, the article will index again, and when it does, it’ll be the ugly indexing with the code showing instead of the nice abstract/description. I’ll come back and show you all when it does.

Let’s look at another one.

There’s a pretty one, the way an article SHOULD index. This is my Google Twitter article, and it’s properly indexed with the abstract/description.

Now, let’s look at another one:

This is my CPS article I wrote BEFORE I wrote the google article. It’s already dropped out of site and come back. now look at the ugly code in the description. Do you think if that is available to people amidst other search results with good descriptions that they are going to click on the AC link or another link with a brief description and not a lot of code?

AC Admin, please if you’re reading this, talk to the tech guys – go back and read my multiple posts about this on the forum. I will gladly talk to them, email them, call on the phone, whatever, to make this indexing issue right! It’s hurting everyone’s bottom line, AC’s included!

Okay, enough of that. I seem to be harping on that, but it’s just so crucially important to success on AC.

Another thing… I’d been focusing on Clout and as such, I was pushing to get my clout up faster, and by doing so, was putting up DO articles. But for this short of a challenge, the fast money is in the offer. The real benefit of the DO articles won’t come in less than a month.

So I really do have to change the scope of the challenge. Also, to do an accurate comparison to Helium, I need at least 72 articles submitted for upfront… minimum. So instead of focusing on clout, I need to focus on the upfronts, or I won’t get an accurate comparison.

One of the questions asked was whether or not my clout was displaying properly on my challenge account. No, it’s not. It hasn’t from the beginning. I never saw clout three until my clout level changed to clout four. I sat at clout one, then my profile said clout one but the account said clout two, then it said three on the account and one on the profile.

Right now, I’m at clout five, but it’s showing clout three still, as of this morning.

(shrug) doesn’t matter… the proper clout does show up in the account area, and that’s all I care about. Once you get to 10, it doesn’t change anyway. But I still say that the clout is very good as a challenge to myself.

All right, quick update: I have 6 articles I put up this morning. I averaged about 17 minutes each to write and submit them. Searching for pictures takes about five minutes longer for the whole process. At this point, I’m not sure if submitting pictures with articles is beneficial to the writer anyway.

When it’s crunch time and you’re trying to get out as many quality articles as you can, pictures that don’t affect your offers seem to be… well, a waste of effort.

I also have one resubmitted article pending review and one stuck in processing. I have a feeling the processing one won’t publish until the offer on the resubmitted one comes. We’ll see. I submitted one with bullets using the text editor button – curious to see if it gets accepted.

I did reach payout on the performance bonus, so that’s good. I’ll be making at least $1.50…LOL

My PVA right now is sitting at about 60 per article, but if you take out the one article that hasn’t indexed in Google, it goes up to 67. I have one over 200 views and two over 100 views now, and they aren’t even a week old yet, so that’s not too bad.

The hardest part of this is that these articles just aren’t getting indexed, or aren’t getting indexed properly. That needs fixed, ’cause there’s where the big bucks are.

I’ll update with the upfronts as soon as they come in – I’ve put up 6 today, hoping for more this afternoon after I finish some of my other work.

any questions?

Love and stuff,
Michy
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I’ve been telling AC for months now that they are hurting themselves with the indexing issues going on. I’ve been openly vocal about it both in the AC forums and outside of AC. I’ve given them detailed explanations as to what is happening and even WHY it is happening.

The only response I’ve received is was through the grapevine from AC in the forum from one employee stating that the tech people said our articles are, “As discoverable as they ever were…”

Bullshit.

I’ve been lucky on my real account, so far, that all my links have index. Even so, mine are still dropping off and then coming back later.

However, on my challenge account, some of them just flat out are not indexing.

It shows in the page views too. The ones that have indexed are all over 60 and some are over 100 at this point. The ones that haven’t indexed are 3 page views, 10 page views and 11 page views.

My challenge account doesn’t have ‘friends’ and ‘fans’ that have built up to carry traffic to the page, he or she can’t promote at all because they are a fake person, so this account is counting on the Google Juice AC has, but when articles aren’t indexing, there IS no Google Juice.

It’s VERY discouraging. Including the ones that have indexed, I have a page view average (PVA) of 50. Taking the ones out that didn’t index, and I have a PVA of 68.

That’s in two week’s time. It’s growing and I should be well over 100 by the end of the challenge, and I’m hoping over 500 by June when I come back and do the summary for all three sites I’m reviewing.

So where do I stand now?

The hourly rate I’ve currently made on AC for the first two weeks of the challenge is: $5.23 per hour.

It’s below minimum wage, but it two bucks per hour more than my average with Helium at the end of the challenge with them. It’s too soon to draw specific comparisons, but as it stands now, I am making more money with AC per hour spent working than I did with Helium.

Unfortunately, I’m also getting more headaches. The non-indexing is breaking into my bottom line, the site glitches are HIGHLY frustrating, and if they didn’t exist, I’d be able to spend more time writing and less time staring at the screen waiting for things to load.

That is one part of AC they REALLY need to work on.

Okay, so I had two more offers both for 4.98. I was then rejected for another article. All three articles were similar ‘styles’ and all were based on ‘minor medical treatment’ of an ‘ordinary condition’ that you can do at home. Two of the articles clearly said in the first paragraph that I had either dealt with this issue or had some experience with it, but the third one, the one that was rejected, did not. It was third person.

They said I needed to cite my sources, or if I was a source, to state that in the body of the article. Well, I’m not going to say, “I am the source of this information…” and I’m sure as hell not calling myself a source like AC wants to call us now (had to get that in somewhere, I HATE ‘source’ as a name for what we are), so I basically added ONE sentence to the end of the first paragraph that said it was from personal experience, similar to what I’d done on the others. I resubmitted it and it’s now showing ‘resubmitted’ and pending. Interestingly enough, the other two are still in processing.

I’m assuming they won’t get published until that one is looked at again. I hate that. It really stinks to have good, timely articles that just ‘sit’ there.

I could have sworn they said they were moving toward instantly and automated publication after acceptance. (shrug)

Soooo, that’s where I stand for now. Time to ramp it up a bit… got lots of writing to do next week!

Any questions?

Love and stuff,
Michy
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Got a couple of offers today. Strange they came in so late. Either someone works evenings, or someone is pulling overtime! Either way, I’m grateful to see some more progress on articles submitted for upfront!

I got two of them so far tonight – one was for $5.02 and the other for $4.98. It’s interesting too, because I’m getting to where I’m predicting which ones are going to get higher offers. I expected the 5 buck one to do better than the 4.98 one, but I thought it would have more spread between them.

Still, that puts me up to about 28-ish total bucks at this point paid, plus whatever in revenue from the bonus and what’s pending payment, at least until the update tomorrow. Lots and lots of DOs went up yesterday and today, but too late to get any page views reported on them. I think the page view reporting is about 1/2 a day behind real time. That’s cool… it’s great to have it that close!

I’m having problems getting articles to show up on the profile. I posted four articles last night, and not one of them showed up on my profile until well after 10am this morning. Also, my clout level on my profile is wrong, wrong, wrong. I can see the right clout on my profile account, but not the public profile, and YES, I tired saving my profile and updating it, changing my profile and update it, everything… and it’s still behind. (shrug) it’s disheartening! The actual number of total articles on the article list SAYS the right amount, but they aren’t all showing for people to read. If this were my REAL account, no biggie, because my subscribers can still read with a direct link – but on the newbie account I only have a handful of friends!

That one article still didn’t index yet, and it is BY FAR the lowest performing article, and no page views have changed on it for three updates. Please, please, please, if you have articles that are abnormally low in page views and you don’t see any reason why, read yesterday’s blog and see if it’s perhaps because it’s not indexed. Several people have come to my forum and posted links and have gotten articles–some as old as 3-6 months old–that haven’t indexed!

I’ll update more tomorrow on page views and such, but I just wanted to pop in with the two newest offers.

The one things that’s very clear to me comparing Helium and AC is that on Helium, you seem to constantly stay ‘busy’ doing stuff, rating, reading, writing, marketplace… so many different things to do, and the stats update in near real time. Their big difference between AC and Helium is that Helium’s site never ‘broke’. I’m having a lot of ‘hurry up and wait’ on AC, not very ‘busy’ it seems, and the site is constantly not loading, loading very slowly, or there’s minor glitches here or there at every turn. Waiting is frustrating. Glitches are frustrating. Etc.

So we have four more up today, and two more I was just waiting for the publish template to work again to put up, and I’ll probably do four more before I crash tonight. That’ll be ten more today.

If I’m figuring the clout properly, if each of these new articles gets just 10 page views each, I’ll hit clout four by Friday, and that gives me the weekend to work toward clout five.

Think I can do it!

Love and stuff,
Michy
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